A lot of people are interested in affiliate marketing, but they’re not really sure what to do and what steps to take. That’s what I’m going to share with you in this article. It’s my guide to affiliate marketing for beginners.

I also want to talk about what not to do because I’ve made some mistakes over the years which cost me both money and time. I’ll share those with you as well so that you don’t make the same mistakes.

1. What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you, as the affiliate marketer, find somebody who has an affiliate program and then promote their products for a commission. For example, one of the places that I use is Udemy. I have a partnership with them and they pay me 15% of all sales that I generate through someone clicking on my links.

To get your own affiliate link, you basically have to sign up as an affiliate and then the company will automatically generate a link for you which is unique.

Then, when you promote anything on Udemy, instead of sending your visitors directly to their website through the link, you use a sales funnel like Click Funnels. And, because you are also an affiliate with Click Funnels, you’ll get an extra 15% commission on every sale you generate.

Because my niche is helping people to make money online, I like to share the tools that I use through my affiliate links. Therefore, I’m an affiliate for Udemy, Click Funnels, and Loomly which is a social media scheduling tool.

One of the things I really like about affiliate marketing is that if someone signs up for one of the tools I promote and they have a problem or need some additional help, they don’t come and ask me. They go straight to the company that owns the tool because they’re the experts.

Therefore, one of the biggest advantages of affiliate marketing is you don’t have to worry about customer service because the company whose products you’re promoting handle all of that.

So in a nutshell, affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products. This means you don’t have to develop your own products or handle any of the customer service.

2. How Do You Choose A Niche

Basically, a niche is a topic and collection of products that you’re going to build your business around. To pick a niche, you should choose something that you enjoy talking about.

There’s no point choosing a popular niche if you’re not really interested in it. Personally, I would rather make less money doing something I thoroughly enjoy talking about than making more money and hating my work every day of the week. Therefore, you want to choose something you’re going to enjoy.

And, that’s the advantage of starting your own business. You get to choose what you want to promote. So, as an example, let’s look at how to start a dog business. But, let’s narrow it down even further.

How about starting a dog training business. Training dogs might be a skill that you have and that you can talk about all day long. You could add to that by talking about dog grooming or what kind of food is best. But, you want to mainly focus on dog training so that people recognize for that.

You could even narrow your niche down further by only focusing on a certain breed. That will make your business more specialized and reduce the competition.

So, how do you then find products to promote within your chosen niche?

3. How To Find Products To Promote

Finding affiliate products to promote is quite easy with just a Google search. Just put something like ‘affiliate program for dogs’ into the search bar.

On the other hand, you might have some products that you use yourself and that you really like. All you have to is look up the brand on Google and see if they have an affiliate program. You can either check the company website or send them an email to ask.

Then, once you’ve found some products to promote, all you have to do is talk about those products in the posts or articles that you write. One thing to remember is to promote a couple of higher priced products along with the lower priced ones.

One thing I do recommend is to not overwhelm yourself with too many products. Just choose maybe five products to start with and learn about those so you can talk about them authoritatively.

Then, once you’re comfortable in promoting those products and writing about them, you can move onto the next batch.

You might be asking – but how do I get people to see my products? Let’s discuss that now.

4. How To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Two of the best places to promote products are on your own blog or website and on your YouTube channel. However, a lot of people do swear by Facebook, so let’s start there.

The first thing you want to do is join some Facebook groups in your niche. Then, just start communicating with people and building relationships. Once people know that you’re an expert in your niche, they’ll start asking you for advice.

When that happens, you can just direct them to your blog or YouTube channel to get more information. Once you can get people to your blog or channel, you want to keep them for as long as you can. Therefore, in your articles or your video descriptions you need to have links to your other articles or videos that talk about a similar subject.

Of course, within those articles and videos you also want to have links to the products that you’re promoting. People who want what you have will follow you and eventually buy from your links because they like and trust you.

And, that’s precisely how you build your audience. But remember, it does take time to build up this audience from scratch.

Five Ways To Create Content

If you don’t know where to start with creating your content, I’m going to briefly go over five different ways that you can do this.

1. Write A Review About A Product

Let’s say you want to promote a dog leash, for example. Therefore, you would write a review about it explaining the features and benefits and what you love about it. Or, you could create a video and talk about all the great features of the product.

2. Write A Comparison Post

The next thing you can do is search out the competing products in the marketplace and then write a comparison post. Ideally, you want to compare a more expensive product as well as a cheaper one. Then you recommend your preferred product which is priced in the middle of the two.

3. Talk About Why Your Product Is The Best

Whereas, in your review article, you wrote about all the features and benefits of the product, in your ‘best’ article, you explain exactly why you think the product that you’re promoting is the best on the market.

So, this will be similar to the review article, but you’re rephrasing it in a different way.

4. Do A Demo

For this, you could make a video while you’re using the product and explain why you like it and why you think it’s better than the others.

5. Answer Some Common Problems That People May Have

For this, you want to discover some common problems that people may have and then answer those with how your product can help alleviate them.

And, for each problem that you discover, you can write another piece of content to help solve that problem. Of course, in each article that you write or each video you create, you want to have a link or two so that people can actually buy the product that you’re promoting.

If you want some more in-depth information about anything I’ve talked about, you can download my free Guide to Affiliate Marketing here. It’s a 43-page ebook with all the information you’re going to need.

Mistakes To Avoid

Remember I said I was going to share some of the mistakes that I made? Well here are the ones you should avoid.

1. Concentrate On One Thing At A Time

Don’t try and start a blog and a YouTube channel at the same time. Concentrate on just one to start with and get really good at it. Choose the one that works the best for you and then hire a freelancer to help you out with things you’re not so good at.

If you love to write, then start with a blog. If you prefer to create videos, then do that first and hire a freelancer to turn those videos into blog posts for you.

2. Don’t Put Your Affiliate Links All Over Social Media

I probably did that for the first 6 months because that’s what I was taught and I regret it. It just doesn’t work and you would be wasting your time and effort.

It’s far better to build a solid property like a blog or a YouTube channel that’s going to stay around for a long time and that people will revisit time and again.

I hope all this information has been helpful for you. If you want more great information about starting your online journey, feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Or, if there’s something specific you want to know more about, feel free to leave a message in the comments below.

You’ve Got This!